French Muslims express ‘anger, sadness’ after Nice attack. Latest attack comes amid heightened tensions between France and Muslim world over caricatures of Prophet Muhammad.
Police officers stand watch by the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption Basilica in Nice after Thursday’s attack.
Police officers stand watch by the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption Basilica in Nice after Thursday’s attack.
French Muslims reacted with horror at Thursday’s killing of three citizens within the seaside town of Nice, saying the crime is representative of neither their faith nor values.
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The attack, which happened inside a church, is that the third of its kind during a little over a month and comes amid heightened tensions between Muslim countries and France.
Several calls to boycott French goods were made last week after President Emmanuel Macron defended the proper to caricature Prophet Muhammad.
Macron’s comments came after the brutal killing of Samuel Paty, a secondary school teacher who showed his pupils drawings of the prophet during a discussion on free speech
Yasser Louati, a French civil rights activist, said perpetrators of such crimes make no distinction between Muslims and Christians and subscribed to an ideology alien to Islam.
“A woman was beheaded inside a church, this suggests these people don’t have anything to try to to with the sacred. There are not any moral boundaries for them,” Louati told Al Jazeera.
“About 750 people were killed in mosques across the planet , why can’t we connect the dots and see that this ideology has been spreading that we lost thus far the battle of ideas.
“We affect these attacks as if they were break away each other once they aren’t .”
